Tony Richardson updates Vladimir Nabokov's novel, set in Weimar Germany, to mod London in the Sixties. Nicol Williamson stars as Nabokov's ridiculous hero (his name changed from the novel's Albinus to Sir Edward More) and a mini-skirted Anna Karina plays his mistress. Sir Edward, a bored, boring art collector, becomes infatuated with a movie usherette and forfeits his wife, child and place in society for her. A grotesque ménage à trois develops when his girlfriend takes a boyfriend--an art world hanger-on who knows an opportunity when he sees one. Passing himself off as a harmless homosexual, he too becomes part of Sir Edward's collection. When an auto accident blinds the collector, the two young lovers play a prolonged game of blind man's bluff, taunting him for his previous metaphorical blindness as they play on his real blindness; never telling him of the lover's presence, they whip him into a frenzy of paranoia. Andrew Sarris, writing in the Village Voice in 1965, comments: “It is easy to see why Richardson would be tempted by this sort of material with its apparent sourness and cynicism, its modishly sick humor, and its intellectually certifiable melodrama.... But the resemblance of novel to film is only on the surface. The psychological links from beneath the surface have been neatly severed by the adaptation.” Still, the film has an eerie quality all its own, and even Sarris credits it as “a good try, full of intelligent modifications and economical equivalences, many of which can be fully appreciated only by someone who has read the book.”